Movies - Safe

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	Movies - Safe

Safe is a 1995 drama/thriller film directed by Todd Haynes.

Plot

Set in the San Fernando Valley in 1987, the film recounts the life of a seemingly unremarkable homemaker, Carol White (played by Julianne Moore) who develops multiple chemical sensitivity, an allergic reaction to the visible and invisible toxins that plague her everyday life. Her environmental illness is not taken seriously by conventional medicine and psychotherapy, so she seeks solace in a fictional new-age/religious community in the desert called Wrenwood. Here, she strives for immunity from a world that has rejected her, and which she subsequently rejects.

Critical reaction

Arguably Haynes' most critically successful film to date, Safe has been described as a character study without a character. Julianne Moore, in a breakthrough role, plays Carol White, a southern California homemaker who develops an inexplicable, seemingly incurable illness. Moore's search for a cure -- or even an explanation -- leads her to seek the help of medical professionals, psychologists, and New Age gurus. As the film progresses two possible, not mutually exclusive, explanations emerge: the first, is that Moore's "illness" is, in fact, only psychosomatic; the second, is that she suffers from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS, also known as "Twentieth-Century Disease"), a medically controversial diagnosis in which the patient is putatively allergic to everyday household and industrial chemicals. Haynes exploits this central ambiguity to launch a self-reflexive exploration of classical narrative structure, questioning its tendency to ecclipse the importance of social and political realities by restaging them as interpersonal dramas driven exclusively by character psychology. In taking this approach to the material, Haynes makes good on his academic background in the theoretically-inflected field of Art Semiotics. Bat far from reading like a college essay, Safe is a deeply felt and emotionally resonant exploration both of a single woman's struggles with illness and of a more persaive zetgeist of fear and alienation. Moore imbues the intentionally two-dimensional character of Carrol White with a naivete and tenderness that's heartbreaking to watch.

The film also demonstrates Haynes' long-term interest in the once-maligned genre of the "Woman's Picture," a territory both he and Moore would reapproach in "Far From Heaven." But where the film was a meticulously exact homage to the Technicolor melodramas directed by Douglas Sirk in the 1950s (particularly, "All that Heaven Allows"), Safe crossfertilizes the domestic melodrama with horror and sci-fi stylistics -- many critics compared it to "2001: A Space Odyssey" in its long-take, long-shot austerity -- therein creating a truly unique genre mongrel.

Safe was produced by Christine Vachon, founder of Killer Films and so-called godmother of the New Queer Cinema.

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Movies - Safe

Plot

Critical reaction

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